“I want to go home,” my mom once said when we were driving back home after a long day of pulling out weeds from our dacha’s garden. I quickly informed my mom that we were almost there.
“No, not that home,” she replied. “I mean I wanna go home, home.”
Neither my dad nor I understood what she meant by that, so we brushed it off as yet another outburst of mom’s ever-present melancholy (back then, words like “depression” were absent in Russia, just like sex and drugs were “absent” in the USSR). Fast forward to ten years laters, and I, too, suddenly found myself missing home, home in the same melancholic fashion like my mom, as I was making my way to my friend’s place in Midwood. Squeezed between two foul-smelling men on the Q train, I felt this unknown emotion hit me almost as hard as the train would have, but I survived… barely.
Home, home wasn’t a place. It wasn’t even a feeling. One might say it’s a sense of security or belonging, of childhood lightheartedness, of the belief that everything’s going to be okay. But all these adjectives are plain wrong. Home, home is a place that no longer exists so it’s almost impossible to describe it in regular human words: it’s an other-wordly emotion, so intense and so deep, that it crawls under your skin like a parasite that latched onto you somewhere in the Congo river. My home, home was our first apartment in Ufa, with only one bedroom, one bathroom and three windows overlooking lilac trees and apple orchards. It had a balcony where I used to sleep during these tender, warm summer nights when the whole world seemed to stop dead silent, while I was wide awake staring into the neighbors’ windows. At home, home, there were no life-crushing disasters – maybe, an occasional F in algebra or a skirmish with a popular girl, but that was all there was to worry about. At home, home, if you ever got sick, mom made sure that you felt better. The world around home, home was a brutal mash-up of the bits of a fallen country, heroin needles scattered on playgrounds, sad droopy faces and hungry children with dirty hands and feet, but I didn’t see any of that. In the safety of my home, home, I was always surrounded by best friends and nicest people. No one wished me harm. I was never lonely. I was safe. So much life was ahead of me, and I couldn’t wait to live it.
Feeling these memories flood my brain was as painful as it was revelatory. The house where we bought our first apartment still exists. The playground is there, too. The shops are the same, the people are the same, the streets still have the same potholes in them, so they’re all there, too. But home, home is gone. I’ll never get to visit it again – not while I’m on Earth, at least. At last, I knew what my mom was talking about. Struggling to make a living and raise me and my sister, scared to death by the uncertainty and brutality of her country, living without any support network, with both her parents dead and her husband aloof – buried under all this shit that we call life – no wonder that my mom was missing her home, home just like now I missed mine.
In the comfort of my home, home, all I was dreaming about was to travel the world: to meet exciting foreigners, live a life full of adventure, see new places each week… I’ve done all these things, over and over again, for five years in a row. I packed my bags, checked into my flight, settled in a new place, made friends with exciting foreigners, even fell in love with them only to be disappointed later (why is it not common to bring flowers on a date? I still don’t understand – so now I buy my own flowers). I’ve lived in New York City, Dublin, London, Sydney, San Francisco, Istanbul and a myriad of other places. And you know what?
I’ve never been happier than when I was living in our tiny apartment in Ufa that overlooked the lilac trees. They smelt like heaven. Now, because of all the stress of my dream life, I’m allergic to pollen, so I won’t even be able to smell them.
I exit the train and walk for what seems like ages until I reach my friend’s apartment. I knock on the door. She opens, immediately hugging me.
Perhaps, there is a way to make a new home, home – one way to do this would be to add a second floor to a crumbling building. But will it hold? Should I even try?
Since eventually, it’s bound to go away, too?